IDAT210 - A Context?

Although my project has a basic structure - social networking develops text which becomes sound, this method needs to be set inside some context to make it a viable project.  I am finding this context however quite difficult to define as though I know the process would work it is a bit clunky and almost acts a two separate processes strung together which makes it difficult to come up with one underlying context which fits.  This post is to investigate the elements of my basic idea and see how I can work it around to make a more solid and whole project idea.
Firstly lets look at the two processes that have manifested in my project.  The first of these is the chinese whispers process.  This is the most experimental of the two processes and is also the main supporting element of the project.  This process was influenced by the Dadaist poetry methods of taking pieces of text and remixing them to produce a whole new piece of text.  Rather than doing this physically though my idea was to do this remixing in terms of response in that a person comments on a piece of text and this comment becomes the new piece of text which then gets passed on - alike to chinese whispers.  The next question is why am I doing this? Firstly it is bringing the concepts of Dadaist poetry into the modern era through social networking.  Also it can be looked at in terms of social networking as an investigation into communication and whether a conversation develops or stays the same.  This however does not seem to sit quite right and so maybe I should rethink the process slightly so that the focus becomes more about translating Dadaist poetry techniques into a social networking environment which is reliant on communication. 
The second process is the part in which the final piece of text, all the lines from the chinese whispers put together, gets reproduced as a sound.  This process seems like a bit of an aside in the whole but was influenced by the idea that there has not been any sound related work for social networks, only visual, and that sound can be performed, linking my project back to digital performance.  However it is questionable as to whether a singular piece of sound that would be produced at the end of this project could be considered a performance as it would be quite a static element, even if say a visualisation was put with it.  It therefore may pay to consider how the sound element of my project could be redesigned or re-thought to be more performance based.
So the first step is to redefine my underlying process based on my original idea so that it deals more closely with communication and Dadaist poetry in social networking. Firstly I think I need to decide on the reasoning for my process and in this way the process can be developed from its aim.  For this I need to consider my keywords again:

• Generative Art
• Digital Performance
• Dadaist poetry
• Social Networking
• Sound/Music Production

Social networking is a form of communication that is relatively new, and has been critisied for reducing direct communication, even though it could be considered to be enhancing communication in general.  Networking obviously is an important part of social networking as it allows users to network their communications easily and efficiently to many people.  In order to justify using a social network as part of my process I have to base my reasoning on something that social networking provides exclusively such as these, other than just having access to a large amount of people.  The concept of the original process came from the element of comments in social networking such as facebook in which you can see various comments and the tangents of thought that occur from one original post.  It was this openness of thought that I was planning to capture through my process, but in a different way to that achieved in a normal 'comment' situation.  Normal comments are also in context whereas my original process was planning to remove the context of the comment to provoke a greater reaction in the comments made.  However how can social networking comments be seen as different to passing a piece of paper around a room which everyone writes on?  I think the answer to this is a number of things.  Firstly the main element of social networking, distance between people, is an important area to consider along with the instantaneous nature of social networks.  A piece of paper could not be passed from one person in England to another group of people in America without a substantial amount of time being taken in between, if social networking tools are not used.  There is also a longevity to social networking as people can go back to their comments or posts at any time and add something to them.  Similarly people can use this longevity to look over a period of time at the changes say in a persons status.  The openness of the information here is quite important as again, someone could keep a diary which they could look back on, but this would only be available to the individual and anyone else that they showed it to, rather than others choosing whether to look at the information or not.  However it is interesting to note that there is a similarlity between comments on social networking and the same process on paper, as comments cannot be edited or changed, only removed or added.  Overall however it is the unlimited information sharing capabilities of social networking sites that make them so different to other forms of communication as it is very easy to share and recieve thoughts and opinions to and from many people across a wide range of locations very quickly.  With these differences I think it is viable that I can use social networking comments for my project if I wish as it is different to other methods, the question now is precisely how to deal with them to make my project work.
One thing that is obvious in this remodelling of my idea is that the sound produced should be running and updating live off of whatever information it is based on.  This is because in order for it to be a digital performance it needs to be performed over a period of time, rather than just played at any point.  The only problem with this is that I currently have no idea of how to set up a system which changes and plays the sound live off of the data.  In my idea creation though I feel my knowledge in any subject should not cause restrictions and so for now this problem will be ignored.
Another element that I feel is important in this redeveloped idea is that the sound is in some way based on the networks between the people whose comments are used.  This is because social networking visualisations are very focused on the networks and communities created and so to create a sound of social networking in response to the number of visualisations I need to include the main content of the image based versions.  However I am not sure how this would be achievable at all as the networks between people are not obvious enough for a system to know about them as it creates the sound.
The next question to answer is how is the sound going to be created? The main plan for this was to use the text written by participants but there are other options also.  There is the addition of a comment in itself, the participants name, and the time of submission that could be used.  However the text written will be the most dynamic and so the most interesting to use.  This decision relies on how complex a piece of work I wish to create as the text will make the sound development more complicated whereas something like date and time will be easier to manipulate.  The main problem I am struggling with here is that I want to include an organic process as the major section of my piece as this is what makes digital art most different to previous art.  If I just use something like the date and time of a post there is no process other than the conversion to sound which is not an artistic process but a technological one.  Whereas if I choose to get each participant to carry out a process of sorts with a piece of text for example the process is there and so it will be part of my project.  This is what I would prefer to do, but therefore I have to develop a process that has a context for the project and is viable in terms of what I am trying to do.
Dadaist poetry relies on taking a piece of text and randomly re-organising the words to create a new piece of text.  One option therefore is to kind of replicate this, for example providing a piece of text and getting one person to change a single word and then pass it on.  Another option is to provide a piece of text which the user has to randomly re-order and then passing this on to the next person to re-order again.
I feel that the process I use should somehow comment on the freedom of thought achieved by social networking sites and how this develops communication.  Social networking currently is focused on portraying how you are feeling at the current time, and updating this as often as possible to keep the information current, in a way it aims to portray your digital personality and this key feature based on thoughts, emotions and opinions should be somehow considered in my project process.  This leads me back to my previous process to some extent as the point of this was that each participant posted their own comment (opinion) on the previous persons comment.  The final outcome of this would be an organic development through peoples opinions and thoughts. 
There is also the option of not providing the participants with much information at all other than that they should post something as a comment.  This is an interesting idea as a lack of communication about what to do will hopefully still provide some form of communication between the participants, demonstrating how social networking aids communication, whilst metaphorically incorporating the concept of the reduction in communication caused by social networks.   These communications in terms of text can then be taken and used to manipulate and add to the sound file.  This also incorporates some elements of freedom of thought and opinion as it is left open to the participants as to how the content transforms.
I quite like this idea and so after much deliberation through various problems this will now become my re-developed construct for my project.  The purpose will be to demonstrate how social networking aids communication.  The process will be the organic development of communication achieved purely through the participants own opinions and thoughts on content that has been added previously. The sound will hopefully be transformed as the communication is changed so that there will be a performance element.